Slumdog Millionaire

[qsaark]

Well it won 8 Oscars and has one of the highest investment-revenue ratio. Is it any good? i don't know you tell me.

Well winning Oscar is no criteria. For instance The Guns of Navarone won Oscar but it was a mediocre movie at best.

 

[Bane Blade]

welcome my son welcome to machine!!!
truth is this oscar was just a mirage. truth is sour and sick, But i have no sympathy for these roaches, they are making our country lag behind. unedcated lazy uncivilized thrash!(to his father) Any ways s90 This had to come sometime. dream dont go on for ever. You have to wake up some time, and this is ground reality of the poors of india.

You sound like you want to have a dictatorship for some reason but anyway the film had a good story missing some crucial things but in the end pointing out that you can take 2 ways out of the slum either Salim or Jamal.

 

[Zovc]

Well winning Oscar is no criteria. For instance The Guns of Navarone won Oscar but it was a mediocre movie at best.

Well that's why i put in the "8" in there. Besides Unlike Slumdog, Guns of Navarone did not win best motion picture award.

 

[qsaark]

Well that's why i put in the "8" in there. Besides Unlike Slumdog, Guns of Navarone did not win best motion picture award.

The Last Emperor, 1987. Won all 9 Oscars, yet was a low quality movie as compared to Fatal Attraction and The Untouchables in the same year (1987). Another example is Titanic. It won 11 Academy Awards, but man, what a disappointment. Good Will Hunting and As Good As It Gets were much better in every respect. We have to admit that the criteria for the selection of movies is very subjective.

 

[Captain03]

Its an indian film in the sense the its story is indian,its characters are indian and so are most of the technicians.I made my point.

Now its up to the natural right & own sense of responsibility for our pakistani friends to prove how an Oscar wining film like slumdog isnt really indian as it made out to be and deprive wily indians taking any positive mileage out of it.

because the makers and the cast [including the indian staff] stated that it was british
aa duh!

 

[Energon]

because the makers and the cast [including the indian staff] stated that it was british
aa duh!

This was a cross-over film; an Indian-western collaboration which showcases what both the film industries can do in a combined effort: make a great movie that makes a lot of money and wins a $hit loads of awards. This is the wave of the future (not necessarily limited to film); get used to it.

India as a developing nation has a massive divide between the poor and the rich, just like all other nations that fall into that category; and this film showed just that. But at the end of the day Mumbai and India have been brought into the spotlight; and it seems that the entire world is taking notice. Clearly all of this has made you (an extremely insecure person) very, very upset. The good news however is that nobody cares about you, or your insecurities.

Despite the "poverty ****" people will now start wondering about India, major studios will want to tap into the market, more and more cross over movies will be made, Frieda Pinto will feature in every major magazine, Dev Patel will make enough money to sustain him for a lifetime, Anil Kapoor will be the face of India, and billions of dollars will start flowing in just because people are curious about India.

Sucks for you and all the other whiners on this thread. Get over it.

 

[s90]

Nothing sells like poverty

By Arundhati Roy Exclusive to Dawn

THE night before the Oscars, in India we were re-enacting the last few scenes of Slumdog Millionaire. The ones in which vast crowds of people (poor people) who have nothing to do with the game show, gather in their thousands in their slums and shanty towns to see if Jamal Malik will win. Oh, and he did. He did. So now everyone, including the Congress Party is taking credit for the Oscars that Slumdog won (!)

It claims that instead of India Shining, it has presided over India ‘Achieving’. Achieving what? In the case of Slumdog, India’s greatest contribution, certainly our political parties greatest contribution, is providing an authentic, magnificent backdrop of epic poverty, brutality and violence for an Oscar winning film to be shot in.

So now that too has become an achievement? Something to be celebrated? Something for us all to feel good about? Honestly, it’s beyond farce. And here’s the rub: Slumdog Millionaire allows real life villains to take credit for its cinematic achievements, because it lets them off the hook. It points no fingers, it holds nobody responsible. Everyone can feel good. That’s what I feel bad about.

So that’s about what’s not in the film. About what’s in it - I thought it was nicely shot. But beyond that what can I say more than that it is a wonderful illustration of that old adage : There’s

a lot of money in poverty. The debate around it has been framed (and this helps the film in its multi-million dollar promotion drive) in absurd terms: On the one hand we have the old ‘patriots’ parroting the old “it doesn’t show India in a Proper Light’ type of nonsense (but even they’ve been won over now, by the Viagra of success). On the other hand there are those who say that it is a brave film that is not scared to plumb the depths of India ‘Not-shining’. Slumdog Millionaire does not puncture the myth of “India shining’, far from it. It just turns India ‘not-shining’ into another glitzy item in the supermarket. As a film it has none of the panache, the politics, the texture the humour, and the confidence that both the director and the writer bring to their other work. It really doesn’t deserve the passion and attention we are lavishing on it. It’s a silly screenplay, the dialogue was embarrassing — which surprised me because I loved The Full Monty (written by the same script writer.)

The stockpiling of standard , clichéd, horrors in Slumdog are, I think, meant to be a sort of version of Alice in Wonderland — Jamal in Horror land. It doesn’t work except to trivialize what really goes on here. The villains who kidnap and maim children and sell them into brothels reminded me of Glen Close in 101 Dalmations.

Politically the movie de-contextualizes poverty and by making poverty an epic prop, it dissociates poverty from the poor. It makes India’s poverty a landscape, like a desert, or a mountain range, or an exotic beach- god-given, not man made. So while the camera swoops around in it lovingly, the filmmakers are more pickly about the creatures that inhabit this landscape. To have cast a poor man and a poor girl, who looked remotely as though they had grown up in the slums, battered, malnourished, marked by what they’d been through, wouldn’t have been attractive enough. So they cast an Indian model and a British boy. The torture scene in the cop station was insulting. The cultural confidence emanating from the obviously British ‘slumdog’ completely cowed the obviously Indian cop, even though the cop was supposedly torturing the slumdog. The brown skin the two share is too thin to hide a lot of other things that push through it. It wasn’t a case of bad acting, it was a case of the PH balance being wrong. It was like watching black kids in a Chicago slum speaking in Yale accents. Many of the signals the film sent out were similarly scrambled. It made many Indians feel as though they were speeding on a highway full of potholes. I am not making a case for verisimilitude, or that it shouldn’t have been in English, or suggesting anything as absurd as ‘outsiders can never understand India.’ I think plenty of Indian filmmakers fall into the same trap. I also think that plenty of Indian filmmakers have done this story much much better. It’s not surprising that Christian Colson, head of Celedor (producers of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?), won the Oscar for the best film producer — that’s what Slumdog Millionaire is selling - the cheapest version of the Great Capitalist dream in which politics is replaced by a game show, a lottery in which the dreams of one person come true while in the process the dreams of millions of others are usurped, immobilizing them with the drug of impossible hope (work hard, be good, with a little bit of luck you could be a millionaire.)

The pundits say that the appeal lies in the fact that while in the West for many people riches are turning to rags, the rags to riches story is giving people something to hold on to. Scary thought. Hope, surely, should be made of tougher stuff. Poor Oscars. Still, I guess it could have been worse — what if the film that won had been a film like Guru — that chilling film celebrating the rise of the Ambanis. That would have taught us whiners and complainers a lesson or two. No?

 

[afriend]

Slumdog success helps Chinese critics to complain about lack of freedom

BEIJING: Chinese critics believe that Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar awards because of its political content. Some sections of the Chinese media
are using the movie to indirectly complain that Chinese film makers do not have enough freedom to depict social and economic realities.

"The fate of this movie in India displays a sharp contrast with some Chinese films," an article in China Youth Daily said. It mentioned Chinese film maker, Jia Zhangke, who won international acclaim for his film, Still Life. But Jia was was blamed for "trading the sufferings and sorrows of his motherland for the good impression of Westerners".

Slumdog Millionaire has become a widely talked about movie in China. DVDs with Chinese subtitle of the movie are being sold across the country while it is available for free viewing on several internet sites. Most newspapers and television networks have featured it. The movie has not yet been released in theatres in China.

Yang Yuanying, vice director of Film Studies at Beijing Film Academy, compared it with previous Oscar-winnings like Crash and Babel that had strong political and social content.

"Slumdog Millionaire still included such political elements as race and class," Yang was quoted in the official media as saying.

"Oscar-winner Slumdog Millionaire has resonated with audiences for having the guts to reveal social realities in India - police using torture to coerce a statement, the deaths of civilians out of religious conflicts, and child abductions and abuses," the China Youth Daily said. It praised the Indian government has also been praised for allowing its screening in the face of criticism from people who believed that the movie blemished the image of India.

Well known film critics Bi Chenggong and Zeng Zihang attribute the movie's success at the Oscars to its feel-good factor at a time when the United States was reeling under the financial crisis.

Bi said in an article that the showing of utter poverty in the film acted as some sort of consolation to American viewers hit by the financial slowdown. "To some degrees, it is a kind of encouragement for them not to lose heart," he said.

Another critic described it as "a delicious chicken soup for the soul" of the American people at this time.

Shanghai Business Daily published an article saying Slumdog cannot be described as an Indian version of the American dream because the film was about luck. American values are about striving for love and wealth, the writer, Wei Yingjie, said in the article. The film looks at the third world from the viewpoint of a country that had colonised India, he said while referring to its British director. Such movies do little to help understand and resolve real problems on the ground, he said.
Slumdog success helps Chinese critics to complain about lack of freedom-China-World-The Times of India

 

[Captain03]

This was a cross-over film; an Indian-western collaboration which showcases what both the film industries can do in a combined effort: make a great movie that makes a lot of money and wins a loads of awards. This is the wave of the future (not necessarily limited to film); get used to it.

India as a developing nation has a massive divide between the poor and the rich, just like all other nations that fall into that category; and this film showed just that. But at the end of the day Mumbai and India have been brought into the spotlight; and it seems that the entire world is taking notice. Clearly all of this has made you (an extremely insecure person) very, very upset. The good news however is that nobody cares about you, or your insecurities.

Despite the "poverty ****" people will now start wondering about India, major studios will want to tap into the market, more and more cross over movies will be made, Frieda Pinto will feature in every major magazine, Dev Patel will make enough money to sustain him for a lifetime, Anil Kapoor will be the face of India, and billions of dollars will start flowing in just because people are curious about India.

Sucks for you and all the other whiners on this thread. Get over it.

i dont know why u saying it makes it a collaboration
i mean the makers and staff [including rahman and the indian actors] stated that its a british film
u saying it wont really affect its position

 

[Khajur]

Arundhati Roy is a communist...remember this before reading any of her article to get a better insight.
Also she is more of a communist socialite who fly around the world taking part in demonstarations aganist capitalist policies to return to her bed in a five star hotel room in the evening.

 

[Pk_Thunder]

Slumdog debate: The sordid side of India​

By Shahid Javed Burki

THE British-Indian film Slumdog Millionaire has become a phenomenon in the United States, Britain and other western countries. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won eight of them, including the highly coveted title of the best motion picture of the year.

Not only was the movie a sensation, its three child actors, all plucked from a Mumbai slum inhabited mostly by Muslims were also applauded.

The three kids were flown from Mumbai to Hollywood and attended the award ceremony. The film’s director, an Englishman, said the movie is really a love story — the story of two children who, after going their separate and at times ugly ways, find each other and presumably live happily ever after. The movie ends with a dance and song number — the song also won an Oscar — celebrating the triumph of love over evil.

The Indian reaction to the movie’s triumph was at best mixed. While Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, said that it was a matter of pride for his country that its art and artists had received global recognition, many Indian commentators were less enthralled. Priyadarshan Nair, an Indian filmmaker, wrote in an article published in India Today, that the movie was a poor copy of those made in Bollywood. Besides, it mocked India. He wrote. “India is not Somalia. We are one of the foremost nuclear powers in the world; our satellites are roaming the world. Our police commissioners’ offices don’t look like shacks and there are no blind children begging in the streets of Mumbai.”

There are, of course, blind and crippled children begging not only in the streets of Mumbai but in all major cities of South Asia. To deny their existence is to deny help from reaching them. The political slogan, ‘Shining India’, did not help the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2004 elections. ‘Incredible India’, the slogan with which India began to draw the attention of the world to its economic and political triumphs, must not be allowed to brush under the carpet the lives lived by hundreds of millions of people who have not been touched by the country’s impressive economic performance of the last couple of decades.

There is a tendency among many Indians to become highly nationalistic when what they perceive as the ugly side of their country becomes news. That is unfortunate since there are many areas where India is not doing well and one of them is the quality of services it delivers to the urban poor. That, in part, was the story of Slumdog. The poor in India feel differently about the film. “A lotus from the swamps” is how a proud father of a child actor in the film describes his son’s achievement.

But there was more to the movie and the story it told. It is not really a love story involving two kids from one of the more notorious slums of Mumbai, who ultimately escape poverty and much else to become rich and famous. What appealed to western audiences was the display of audacity on the part of some kids from the slums, with which they are able to mould their future. The three children in the story don’t opt for fame and wealth based on virtue; one of them becomes a leader of a gang that makes its money by exploiting kids from the slums.

This is not only the story of urban India

but of the entire developing world where the heartless exploitation of the poor by the rich is common and beyond the reach of the state. Not only is the state often a bystander in this form of economic exploitation, it is often complicit in what goes in. The police in particular provide little protection to the vulnerable. It often comes out in support of those who exploit. This happens in the slums of Mumbai, Karachi, Dhaka, Sao Paulo and Lagos — in fact, in all the megacities of the developing world.

It is interesting that those who financed the film, produced and distributed it and who consequently made a good profit for themselves are anxious not to be seen as having exploited the slums, those who live in them and the slum children who are desperate to find some way of escape. They have declared that a part of their profit will be used to help the children who acted in the film. Their school will be improved and once they have graduated from it they will be provided financial assistance to attend institutions of higher learning.

The story of ***** and squalor — at one point Jamal, the film’s young protagonist wades through raw sewage to get the autograph of a movie star who has arrived in his helicopter — is the story of millions of children who suffer from the extraordinary environment in which they live. Almost 90 per cent of the two billion projected increase in world population will take place in the developing world by 2050. Of this one-half will live in towns and cities.

About 50 large cities of the developing world will gain an additional 250 million people, 90 per cent of them will find accommodation in the slums of the cities and jobs in the already crowded informal sectors. The probability that one of them will become a millionaire is minuscule. Even the chance of surviving to adulthood and old age is small.

Slumdog is also a vivid portrayal of the environmental degradation that surrounds the people who live in these settlements. Economists have now begun to argue that providing clean drinking water and basic sanitation is an important way for bringing some development to these areas. This is the reason why the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the heads of state in 2000 emphasised not only education but also the supply of quality drinking water and the provision of sanitation to the poor. By focusing on this aspect of life for millions of slum dwellers in India — and by extension in all developing countries — the filmmakers have done a great service.

One likely consequence of public awareness that will definitely result from the success of the film is to attract the West’s civil society to pay some attention to the conditions in the slums of the developing world. Experience has shown that when governments fail non-government organisations step in. This happens in both developed and developing countries. The failure of western governments to increase assistance to poor nations — something they have promised over and over again — has prompted organisations such as the well-endowed Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to step in with assistance.

Likewise NGOs such as Pakistan’s Edhi Foundation come to the assistance of people in distress when the state fails to reach them. By increasing the world’s awareness of the conditions in which millions of people live, Slumdog did not mock India. It has served the world’s poor well.

 

[Energon]

i dont know why u saying it makes it a collaboration
i mean the makers and staff [including rahman and the indian actors] stated that its a british film
u saying it wont really affect its position

The "nationality" of the film for the sake of entry is based on the primary address of the production company; which in this case (Celador, Film4) is the UK. But the production itself isn't British because for that to be the case all the artists and technicians have to be in the members of the local academy and or unions. I'm fairly certain most of the cast and crew do not belong to British film unions, and the Assistant director Loveleen Tandon was credited via her membership with the Indian director's guild.

There have been many cross-over collaborative movies like this one before; it is only now that such a movie has won major awards.

 

[Hello_10]

y is everyone saying slumdog millionaire is an indian film when its actually a british film?
i mean it didnt even release in india until recently after 2 months releasing officially
only the actors are indian as well as some of the cast but the director, the producer, the distrubter, and most of the cast are british.

when I saw Slum Dog Millionaire in 2008, I had said just after the movie that its not an Indian movie, but very likely a British movie, as British government is involved in manipulating India's data for a very long, since 2006. this type of wrong publicity must have a British mind, backed by British Royal Family including British government. why? I said few points as below:

1st, English of Indians is good but its of Middle Class, not of the poor who live in slums, they are mostly uneducated and speak their native language, like hindi/tamil/bengali etc.

2nd, Hence, first this lower class isn't educated enough to work in a Call Centre and second, I knew that till 2003, people of early 20s used to work in Call Centers while doing studies in Delhi, most of them belonging to Upper Middle Class families and to earn pocket money and improve english also at the same time in Delhi....

this movie was made by someone who thinks, "people in India live in Slum, speak english and work in Call Centre.", and this is the only "General Knowledge" British had about Indians in Britain type countries, till mid last decade.

this movie had a certain type of 'Mentality' which confirm that British Royal Family/British Government were behind that making of movie. the mentality was, "in this movie, a man said over 10 very bad things about India, which might be rarely happening now days. and after making the whole India, a Slum Dog, this man had been made a Millionaire, as a 'Reward' ."

and the way British Shiiits were behind manipulating India's datas for so long, it was then just a "Common Sense" for me that British Government/British Royal Family funded and gave enough publicity to that movie, like Oscar also, just to do wrong publicity of India.....

 

[T90TankGuy]

you reactivated a three yr old thread to spew this verbal diarrhea? you need help mate.